Halloween 2018

Today’s annual Halloween Doodle marks a wickedly exciting milestone: our first-ever multiplayer interactive game Doodle, powered by the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)! Join in as ghosts around the world gather to play their own version of Trick-or-Treat: The Great Ghoul Duel! Ghosts team up and compete to see who can collect the most wandering spirit flames before the moon is gone….but not without some unexpected twists along the way.

Players around the world join forces on one of two teams of four in the Great Ghoul Duel. Exploring one of several spooky maps, players must collect as many wandering spirit flames as they can in two minutes and return them to their homebase. After time’s up, the team that has collected the most spirit flames wins. But beware! – opponents can intercept spirits from one another as they bring them back to homebase.

As an added BOOOOnus, ghosts who collect the most spirit flames will unlock special powers such as speed boosts, night vision, and much more! Players can also share personal superlatives awarded to them at the end of the match based on their scary good – or just plain scary – performances.

In a Doodle first, players can choose to host a game with up to seven friends and family via a custom invitation link OR just play with randomized players around the globe. The team built several systems to enable this multiplayer gaming, all running on the Google Cloud Platform, including a highly-scalable matchmaker service by Open Match, a publicly-available open source project developed at Google.